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People often talk of a skills crisis, although we believe we're not there yet.
Action for the future
Action for the future
The future for Cogent’s sector is potentially very bright, but it can only be maximised by action on behalf of employers, employees and public sector organisations to raise the level of skills to remain on the cutting edge and to ensure sufficient supply to meet future demand.
In writing this report, we have sought to continue the approach taken when developing our Sector Skills Agreement over two years ago, when we analysed the labour market and skills provision to determine the major issues affecting our sector, before designing our “Big Ticket” initiatives, in conjunction with the industry, to address them.
The next steps for Cogent are to take this new analysis and revisit our activities, including the Big Tickets, to ensure that they continue to help the sector to achieve its potential as far as possible.
Our analysis shows that the Big Ticket actions continue to address the most important issues, (for example, Careers Pathways addressing attraction of new graduates, and the Competence Assurance programme addressing issues of operational safety standards). However, we are keen to ensure that the impact will be big enough and fast enough to meet the size of the challenge. The upcoming process of relicensing Sector Skills Councils is allowing us to focus on our priorities through our strategic and business plans, and this new analysis gives us the foundation to do so inresponse to the needs of the sector.
We also know that we need to get a more detailed level of understanding of some of the issues we have examined – for example, drilling down under the headline numbers of projected skills demand to see what particular levels of skills are needed, in which industries. We will continue our research and analysis work to address these gaps in the data, including through our new Oracle project, which will survey a significant consistent sample of employers in each of the industries over time, to produce a barometer for economic, skills, training and turnover trend tracking.
This will be the basis of our future action, and we know that the analysis will also be useful to employers and to our partner organisations, in setting out the opportunities and challenges that face the science-based industries into the future.